| Some of the stuff is familiarity, I'm sure, but a lot is immaturity. Things aren't worse just because they're different, but at the same time just because things are different doesn't mean they're not worse. Consider the following issues: 1) In the text message app, the keyboard leaves way less room for seeing the previous texts in your conversation than on iOS. Is this not worse? 2) IE10 shows more artifacts in the process of rendering than Safari. E.g. the aforementioned visible re-rendering during orientation changes instead of the smooth transition. Is this not worse? 3) I'm not sure whether this is the fault of WP8 or the specific apps I used, but chat apps seem to restart each time you switch to them (showing a splash screen), instead of being re-hydrated from memory. 4) When you select a drop-down dialog in IE10, it takes up the whole screen. In iOS it takes up only part of the screen so you can maintain some context by still being able to see part of the page. Is this not worse? 5) Abandoning skeuomorphism makes it harder to figure out what the active parts of the screen are. I think my mom would find the "People" app downright confusing with how it blends bits of the next screen into the current one. It's like a point-and-click adventure game--not always obvious what things are touchable. 6) The ordering of items in the settings menu is, as far as I can tell, totally random. 7) Live tiles can chew through battery life if you're not careful, diminishing their utility. 8) On initial release, the Lumia 920 and WP8 were objectively buggy. Most reviews, and my initial impression, mentioned bad battery life, but those largely went away with the Portico update and a few cycles of discharging the battery all the way, along with turning off NFC. Not exactly the way to launch a highly polished, come-back product. |